


Real Friends

by CXVII



Category: No Fandom
Genre: Dialogue Heavy, Friendship, Gen, Irish, POV First Person, Small cast, Stream of Consciousness, set in ireland
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:40:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27440578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CXVII/pseuds/CXVII
Summary: A pair of lifelong friends are driven to a horrifying realisation about everything they've understood to be true
Kudos: 1





	Real Friends

The strangest thing happened to me a little while ago. Let me tell you a story.

See, I’ve been friends with Kate for as long as I can remember. Literally, as in I have no memories from when I didn’t know her. The two of us were always inseparable, mainly because neither of us are particularly social, to put it lightly. We’d always just go around as a pair, even as kids. I’d spend so much time in Kate’s house that her own parents were starting to be alarmed at how much time we’d spend playing together. Just Kate and Brian, friends til the end, we’d say. Sounds idiotic, now that I think about it. The sort of thing kids say after watching too much American telly.

Not that anything went drastically wrong between then and now, of course. There was no falling out, or anything. We might have been young and oblivious, but we were still right. Some amount of years on, and here we were, still close. No, the strange thing happened just yesterday, after a couple of months of build up. I’ll get to the point.

It all started one, maybe two months ago. I didn’t realise this was the thing that kicked it all off until I started talking just now. Could’ve been any other day. We were sat in Sandycove-ish area, I think. Perched on a big limestone wall that sloped down seamlessly onto the beach, one thick enough for me to lie down on with one leg dangling precariously over the sloped side. Kate was sitting upright beside my head, munching away on a chicken roll, one of two we had bought for our lunch and planned to sit (or lie) in this exact spot to eat. I’d finished mine. I was staring at the sky; a solid edgeless grey, teetering on the line between raining and not, with my open eyes as easy targets for a sadistic hailstone or two. Kate was watching dead ahead, eyes fixed on the apparent border between sky and sea, both in desperate need of some warmth. Her head was tilted slightly to the side and I looked back to see her eyes shift slightly towards some specks in the distance dragging a boat up a pebbledash ramp. It was times like these that I could nearly read what she was thinking as though I were in her head. When she spaced out, I could always bring her back down to earth with a well-aimed question.

Seems like my shot was off that time though, because I tried to open with some stupid comment. I don’t remember it very well, something like “That looks like it’s easier to do when the tide is in, huh?” So it was clear I was paying attention. But not a peep. She must’ve been fairly deep in thought to not tell me to shut up. Instead, a small glob of barbecue sauce fell cleanly from the bitten end of her unfinished roll and planted itself firmly in my hair, above my ear. I groaned and swung myself upright again, which caused me to lose my balance and slide somewhat noisily down the rough decline. Some part of this must have snapped her out of it because she had seen enough to be in fits of laughter looking at me lying in the sand at the bottom of the wall. I lay for a second, looking at the same blanket of grey as before and questioning why I do this to myself, before picking myself up, dusting myself off, and looking up to see exactly why I do. Kate was grinning and giggling to herself slightly, dangling her legs from her sandless ivory tower at the top of the wall.

“Oh, now you’re paying attention?” I shot up at her.

“Yeah, well…” she trailed off. I scrambled atop the wall again, sitting on her right side rather than her left, as there was the spot of barbecue sauce still there.

“Am I gonna have to snot myself every time I want to get a couple of words outta ya?”

I smiled at her. She sighed and began to apologise, but I stopped her.

“Is it bad today?” I ask, quieter. She nods, and my chest goes cold. I just drop my head on her shoulder and she sighs.

After some amount of time, I’m not all that sure how long, I sit up and look at her. “Hey. Hey dude, look at me?”

She glances very slightly in my direction. “Look at me in my eyes!” gets a laugh out of her, and she turns.

“Will you please get help?”

“Brian…” she begins but I stop her.

“Yeah, yeah, I know I keep asking, but you’ve not even tried booking an appointment like. It could help, you never know. It’s all in your head, y’see. And these people specialise in...well, in heads.” Another pause. “Okay, meet me in the middle.” I clamber off the wall and stand carefully on the slope, gripping the wall for dear dignity, to face her. “Will you go if I do all the booking end of business?”

After what felt like forever, she looks at me and quietly nods. I let go of the wall to throw my hands up in celebration and nearly slide down again, dragging another laugh out of her. But it would’ve been worth it to roll down again for that reveal. I was gonna help my best friend get help after years of bugging her about it.

So I did all the stuff, true to my word. I was researching therapy firms left right and centre, and I found one a day or so after the Sandycove incident. I rang up and booked an appointment for her, and she didn’t change her mind. When she was telling me about how it went, I was so buzzed. She didn’t even seem apprehensive, which was the best part. This was the start of the good bit, right?

Turns out, this was the start of the strange bit, too. It seemed as she was getting better, something was up with me. I know that’s obviously nonsense, but it was the first thing that I correlated in my head for some reason.

See, over the next while, I started to notice that Kate was getting better. She’d be chattier, and better with strangers, and she’d be sleeping more, and all that jazz. Which delighted me to no end. But I’d see her a lot less frequently, which was disorienting, having spent all my time with her before. I wouldn’t go to the sessions with her, and I was sleeping a lot more. I assumed that was because I was worrying less, so I was getting more sleep. In hindsight, entire stretches of time are gone from my normally-vivid memory. I must have been sleeping the whole time. But this continues for a few months, like I said. She’s getting noticeably better, but she’s far from cured, so to speak. Having said that, she’s happier, so I am.

Until one day, she wasn’t. One of the days I went to see her, she seemed off again. Like she was before. We were in Stephen’s Green in town one of the days, and it was fairly dense with people. Much nicer day than Sandycove, with more than enough actual sunshine to cast shallow shadows beside hedges and under trees for people to shelter in. We were two such people, lying down on freshly cut grass under the collective shade of a cluster of new birches. She was lost in her usual hobby of people-watching: a pair of women angrily stormed off in separate directions, teary-eyed; a young teenager nervously approaching a horde of kids his age in a worn gazebo; two small children approaching an elderly man with a guide dog, who patiently allowed herself to be pet by the eager kids. Her thoughts were as clear as day to me. Like I was right there, in her head with her.

Despite this, I caught her slightly off-guard with a question.

“What’s on your mind, brown eyes?”

Like I said, she was kind of visibly taken aback. Kate’s not all that confident a person, so she would’ve been rehearsing whatever it is she had to say in her head on a loop. Seems like I had caught her mid-sentence, because she was stammering under her breath, trying to begin a word. I told her to breathe and to take her time, and she did. After a brief moment, she looked at me and started talking. It all came out at once.

“Okay, so, you know the way I’ve been going to Dr. Nolan - well, of course you do, you signed me up and everything, and she’s been really helpful and all, like, stupidly helpful, and I just wanted to say thank you for everything, but -”

“Slow down, dude,” I told her. “Take a breath, maybe?”

She takes another deep breath, and tries again.

“Right. So she had a name to put on the thing that I have, dissociative-something-or-other, I think. And that’s perfect, because now- okay not perfect, so to speak- oh, you know what I…” She buries her face in her hands and sighs. It’s at this point I start to worry a little, because she sounds like she did back at square one. But she sees the concern on my face and apologises.

“Let me start over. The doctor must have hit the nail on the head, because she was explaining to me what people with this yoke typically feel and it fits me perfectly. But as it turns out, there are… uh, I think I had more of the symptoms than I really knew. Because there was this one thing she mentioned that kind of gave me a heart attack…” She started to laugh nervously and scratch the back of her neck. My blood ran cold a little, because I was starting to connect the dots a little.

“Do you know what a paracosm is?” she says.

“I haven’t a clue,” I reply. “Is this a tangent of some sort?”

I can hear her breath catch in her throat. “No, this is...no, not at all. A paracosm is a hallucination, except I think it’s not so much your brain telling you the sky is falling. More like your brain telling you there’s someone outside your window when they aren’t. Specific stuff like that. D’you get me?”

“I think so. What’s this got to do with anything?”

“Apparently that’s one of the hidden things. And they worsen as my state does, you know? If my head gets worse they get more vivid, et cetera. The doc thinks I’ve only got the one, though. Which is good, it just sucks a whole lot because I really don’t want to believe her but it all makes so much sense-”

“Slow down, kid. What exactly is yours?”

And here she drops her eyes to the grass underneath her that she’s been anxiously plucking out of the ground. She inhales and I can hear her chest rack a little in her breath, and it all clicks in my head. The worry goes away, for some reason. Right as she speaks.

“You are.”

Bang. It all made sense, right in that second. She was getting better, the images are more vivid as your state gets worse, and I was vanishing for hours at a time.

“I… I am a caraposm?” I ask.

“Paracosm,” she corrects.

“I’m a hallucination.”

“I’m so sorry Bri, I don’t want to believe any of it but like I said it’s all perfect. She asked me about you when I talked about my best friend and she looked like her mind had been made up when I couldn’t tell her how we met or even what you looked like-”

“Kate? It’s okay. Jesus, I’m not sure why you’re acting like you’re responsible for this.”

“Well, technically, I am.”

I laughed at that. Leave it to her to make a pun, even at a time like this. I guess that’s where I got it from.

It was all kind of just white noise after that point. She kept explaining everything, trying to soften the blow a bit. I guess there’s no easy way to tell someone they don’t exist, so she may as well just get it over with. Ironically, she was trying to talk to me, but all sound was muffled as I was doing her favourite thing in the world. Staring at our surroundings, taking in all the little details. Probably the last time too, now that I was aware of the whole thing. When I was sure she was done talking, I said “So, what happens now?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” she replied, her voice small.

“This is it so?” No reply. “This is probably really strange for you, kid. It should be strange for me, but I kind of just feel… at peace. I’m glad I got you to get help in the end. That’s the main thing for me.”

I go to stand up, and she shoots up with me and grabs me in a vice grip of a hug. I look around for some reason, and everything is moving somewhat slower for me. She murmurs something into my shoulder and I can feel hot tears seep through my shirt a little bit. I hug her back, and take a deep breath.

_ _ _

Sam and his younger sister were sitting in St Stephen’s Green, furiously petting a big golden labrador with a special leash on it. Sam didn’t know what the leash was for, but the old man with the sunglasses was holding onto it and smiling. The dog turned its big head around to face his sister and she giggled. Sam looked around, and for some reason his eye was drawn to a lady standing in the grass, on her own, with her arms wrapped around herself. He shrugged his shoulders and turned back to the dog, who had just sat down on his mum’s foot.


End file.
